About Me

Known principally for his weekly political columns and his commentaries on radio and television, Chris Trotter has spent most of his adult life either engaging in or writing about politics. He was the founding editor of The New Zealand Political Review (1992-2005) and in 2007 authored No Left Turn, a political history of New Zealand. Living in Auckland with his wife and daughter, Chris describes himself as an “Old New Zealander” – i.e. someone who remembers what the country was like before Rogernomics. He has created this blog as an archive for his published work and an outlet for his more elegiac musings. It takes its name from Bowalley Road, which runs past the North Otago farm where he spent the first nine years of his life. Enjoy.

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Friday, 21 February 2014

A Labour Cell In TVNZ's Vast Castle

Stairway To Hell: Like the decrepit dynasty at the heart of Mervyn Peake's grotesque fantasy novel, Gormenghast, the "Heads" at TVNZ's Auckland sprawling headquarters lost track of what was going on within their immense domain.

GORMENGHAST is one
novel of a hell. Imagine J.R.R. Tolkien on acid, C.S. Lewis on speed, and
you’ll hardly have made a mental dent in Mervyn Peake’s grotesque trilogy. I
won’t spoil the books by giving away the plot in detail. Suffice to say that
Gormenghast is an immense castle. So immense that the decrepit dynasty of
Groan, to whom it ostensibly belongs, cannot possibly keep track of everything
that goes on within its walls.

Watching Patrick Gower unfold (with ever increasing glee)
the activities of Shane Taurima and his colleagues at TVNZ headquarters in
Auckland, I couldn’t help being reminded of Peake’s gothic fantasy.

Like Gormenghast Castle, the sprawling TVNZ site had somehow
spawned a secret cell of resistance. How was that possible? Because, like the
Groans, TVNZ’s bosses appear to have become preoccupied with “the obscure and esoteric tenets” of their
governance functions.

For the most part
this involves large numbers of middle managers running up and down the great
staircase that dominates TVNZ’s Auckland headquarters, ducking into tiny
offices, and exchanging information with other middle managers who undertake to
pass it on to yet more middle managers. Only very occasionally (or by accident)
does this information ever trickle down to the people who actually make the
television programmes we see
on air.

Only very rarely
do all the various functionaries of TVNZ gather together. And when they do it
is almost always to pay homage to something called “The Ratings”. These are
collections of viewing data gathered according to specifications laid down at
some point in the far distant past but which are now almost completely
irrelevant to the way people use their television sets, Sky decoders, PCs and
iPhones.

The grand
interpreters of The Ratings are the “Heads” (Head of Programming, Head of
Marketing, Head of Sport, Head of News and Current Affairs). Their job is to
advise the CEO who, in his turn, advises “The Board”.

TVNZ HQ - The higher you climb the less you know.

It is widely
acknowledged within the sprawling edifice of TVNZ that the higher you climb in
the organisation, the less
you know about television. At the level of the Board, for example, virtually
nothing is known about the rights and duties of a state broadcaster.

The similarities
between TVNZ’s top brass, the Groans of Gormenghast, and the peculiar
determination of both elites to cling to the “obscure and esoteric tenets” of
their respective institutions are quite uncanny.

Certainly, it is very difficult to fathom how else Shane
Taurima and his colleagues could run what amounted to a Labour Party branch out
of the Maori and Pacific Television Unit – practically under the noses of
TVNZ’s senior executives – without employing something like the Gormenghast
metaphor.

And, really, can you blame them? It has been years since
TVNZ management demonstrated the slightest respect for the news and current
affairs obligations of what is still, officially, the people’s television
network. They are required to operate in a culture of contempt for the
principles of public service television – an attitude epitomised by the TVNZ
CEO who claimed Police Ten-Seven as
an example of Maori programming by pointing to the large number of young Maori
men and women arrested on the show!

The atmosphere broadcasters are required to inhale at TVNZ
may not be party political, but it is unquestionably ideological. Since 1989,
when Labour removed all references to the public good from the Broadcasting
Act, TVNZ has understood that its real (albeit unwritten) charter mandates the
relentless promotion to New Zealanders of the virtues of neoliberalism, while
rigorously eliminating all those programming options capable of constructing an
alternative worldview.

Mr Taurima’s and his Maori and Pacific Television Unit colleagues’
biggest mistake – apart from believing that they could ever get away with
behaving in such a nakedly party political fashion – was to hang their hats on
securing the election of a Labour-led Government.

In the nine years that Helen Clark’s Labour Party governed
New Zealand no serious effort was made to root-out the pernicious operational
culture at TVNZ or, indeed, to address the manifold defects of this country’s
recklessly deregulated media industry.

Even had TV3’s Patrick Gower not exposed Shane “Steerpike”
Taurima’s cell of resistance in the bowels of the TVNZ Gormenghast, a change of
government would only have confirmed for him The Who’s immortal line:

“Meet the new boss – same as the old boss.”

This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 21 February 2014.

10 comments:

Ennui
said...

Chris, you have described a standard corporate organisation and the internal disconnects quite accurately. During the 90s we all got thoroughly bored with "corporate mission statements" which were supposed to align organisations staff with the desire goals....that too failed because most of it was in Harvard Business School MBA speak.

I once tried to read Gormenghast, got tired very quickly and stopped. Maybe that is why an MBA held no appeal. What I have noticed in business is that the constant restructures designed to make things more effective and efficient, and to drive further profitability (the neo lib dream in a nutshell)seem to create a stasis in which none of the goals are ever realised. From an organisational viewpoint it is not surprising that the head has little real idea what the body is doing, and has no visibility of malign cells: I put that down to the concept of managerial expertise divorced from operational experience and organisational memory.

The reason the managers at TVNZ know not what their organisation does is that they belong to a class of managers who are really a priesthood produced by the business schools. Actually understanding the work at the coal face, the language of the business in which they are engaged, the institutional memory etc are outside of their limited expertise, and outside of their desire to know. In short their whole value is proscribed by their training and consequent meal ticket. They and their fat salaries are a tax and a cancer upon the organisations to which they belong.

Managerialism. It's everywhere. People come into an organisation new – and obviously have to make changes to justify the promotion. It doesn't matter what the changes are, as long as you can be seen to be doing something. Similarly in low decile secondary schools principals come and go, they flail around making changes, they get noticed by the right people and they're off onward and upward having improved nothing. Except in the private sector of course they award each other huge pay increases for doing nothing. :-)

Peake always settled pictures of his characters so steadfastly in your head. Such an acute visual sense. I often think Of Titus's headmaster's agonising teeth problems as my own disintegrate and take up more space in my preoccupations. The knells of decline.

Way the Maori dude being pilloried for his claimed misuse of tax payer funded resources for political gains i find hypocritic as his ex employer had not found it needed to air the main news of the day, Labours appointment of Matt Mc Carten,as the new Chief of Staff.Every other news outline radio station was their headline run.

Who appoints these heads of controllers to decide what is important news in our government controlled news tv.